Dream
by eien yurai
Summary: Years after the story, Christine is a world reknowned singer and yet still finds herself pondering Erik.


The Grand Chandelier descended like a comet. A glittering mass of ice crystals laced with gold that seemed to hang for a moment, above the audience, an impossible feat of gravity. But then it swung, thundering into the orchestra pit, blasting apart steel, flesh, bone and brass. It left a scorched path of glass shards; a crater in the wooden floor, bodies of musicians scattered and tossed like dolls in a little girls' play room. And Christine stood on the stage, observing the massacre in stony silence, her hero Raul rushing up to her past the wreckage, ready to sweep her up into his arms and away to safety. 

And under the dome of the Opera House that was the sky the other observed, like her, cold and detached. Detached? No, such carnage could not have occurred in the presence of detachment. Satisfaction lined that disfigured mask that was his face. He turned and looked at her, sapphire eyes so pure and clear in the crinkled leather that comprised his skin. With his arms around her, pulling her toward him with force and intensity, he smashed his distorted face against hers. Lips tasting of wet granite met hers and the breath of misty catacombs fluttered between her cheeks. 

She was singing. His marionette, strings of fine chain leapt from her wrists to his fingers. She was his mask and the words she sung were his soul, to attack her listeners with emotions kept burning behind a mirror, between him and the outside world, and she was the only gateway for the words and the song to be set free.

-

Christine woke with Raul pressed against her, nuzzling into her bosom like a baby. The silk sheets cocooned their bodies, safe from the terrible Paris winter, bleak and omnipresent. Holding her husband from her, careful to not shift too quickly as to wake him, she slipped out of bed, nimble as a ballet dancer (and wasn't she?) and crept stealthily to the window. 

Snowflakes drifted in the dark, floating downwards to pile up on one another. Horse and buggy carriages pounded them into the ground. Their beauty crushed out of them, the snowflakes bled into water and flowed down gutters. People milled across the street: night owls, drunkards, and the occasion hooker. And there, a cat, slinking in the dark, lurking amid trash piles, in need of the warmth of the cape and the dignity of black. 

One would think that for a wealthy opera singer, famed throughout Europe as the Song Bird of Heaven, she would own a larger window with a better view. Instead, she gazed through a square hole in the wall, coated by dirty glass, unto the roofs of snow-topped houses, crusted with ice under a colder sky. She glanced at her latest jewelry set on her dresser, mere dirty snow compared to the perfect diamonds that sparkled in the millions above her. Had she imagined it differently when she was younger, achieving starring roles, singing songs written by the best composers of her time, desired by the most elegant opera houses in the finest cities? The gaping world yawned before her, a hole in her experience ready to be excavated. Yes, it was as she had imagined, and more, for sleeping in her bed was a man she'd known since childhood, who adored her and worked with her and followed her from town to town, show to show, ever present at her side. Raul. 

The man she wished to have children with. 

He called her his songbird, affectionately in public, differently in bed: My pretty little songbird. 

Song Bird of Heaven she was not. Any one who compared the complexities of Opera to ditties twittered by feathered mice did not understand Opera. Opera was a war cry by some giant bird of prey. Christine thought she would never understand it: the emotions and the notes that flew from her mouth into the void. She could consider herself nothing more than a door for music to be let in by. She let in love, hate, passion, comedy, murder, all to dazzle her audience. 

But for him, for his music, she had burned. Every measure written by his hand sung by her lungs torched its way through her throat, to bat against her teeth and be released. Suffering on a cross of a treble clef, pierced by sharps and flats, she had suffered to bring his message to the world, her Angel of Music. 

Her dream. The image had been printed on her mind one year ago. Had he kissed her then? No, he had not. 

She had kissed him. 

Raul slept heavily, his chest rising and falling to the beat of his dreams. 

Sometimes she forgot the murders, the torture, the fall of the chandelier, and instead of the Phantom in her memories it was the Angel still. Sent by her father to watch over her and teach the talent of which she dreamed. And every once in a while, in a performance when she lost her soul to it, she was no longer acting or singing, she was being, she wondered if he would see her and praise her. 

Admittedly, she missed him in the shadows, knowing he was there. Pressing herself against the mirror willing him to come to her. Glancing up into the balcony and seeing a cloaked figure, lurking in the dark. 

But then the other memories would surface: the hanged man, Raul broken and bleeding, and a monster to pity with a face to fear. "Monsters are not born," her father had said, "They are made." 

And can never be unmade?

He had walked down into the catacombs. He had stayed. Did he stay still? It did not matter. She had her life to live. 


End file.
